Online communication is becoming increasingly pervasive in the connected world economy. Business collaboration has emerged as a mechanism for businesses to increase revenues and decrease expenditures. Furthermore, social collaboration is everywhere with the proliferation of social networking sites on the Internet and the World-Wide Web (WWW).
Automated chatting applications and Internet white-boards have thus far functioned in a linear fashion or in a two-dimensional space. For example, when a user chats with another user online it is a linear communication; similar to a series of electronic mail (email) exchanges between the two users involved in the chat. Chat applications are basically modeled along the lines of a phone conversation; in other words a sequential exchange, where one does not expect an existing conversation to branch off at specific points in time and/or later reconcile at a different point in time to continue that previous conversation.
The problem is that a user wants to be able to pinpoint an actual message belonging to a specific conversation for which he/she is responding. To ensure that a message is assigned to a specific conversation, most software applications and services provide the typical sequential feature/function similar to existing phone technology. But unlike a voice call, users today frequently multitask over the Internet where they are actively involved in many online chats or communications with multiple parties and with multiple threads within a single conversation with a single party. The current and conventional chat user interface (UI) and chat structuring technologies are not conducive to this type of dynamic multitasking and multi-threaded interaction that the Internet provides and that individuals engage in during normal activities associated with today's highly-connected world.
Similar problems exist in other collaboration tools. For example, an online white-board or collaborative workspace normally is very static in nature, and allows one person to lock it and work at the online board one person at a time. But, what is actually real world activity is a board where a person can have everyone working simultaneously on different parts of the same board, and even correct one another on the board. This is what occurs in a real world brainstorming session of an enterprise with multiple participants in attendance. In such a real world meeting there may also be sub groupings of people that pair up in areas of the room to work on subsections of the overall board. This sub group activity can occur simultaneously within the room with other sub group activities and with the overall discussion of the topics on the board continuing unabated. However, these described features/functions of real world activity are not feasible with existing collaboration technologies that exist today in the industry.
In still another problem occurs with document processing, where one expects a single person to author or write to a document at a time; today, there is no easy way to divide up that document and work on it simultaneously. Moreover, correcting information online in another person's subsection of the document is difficult to achieve with existing approaches.
Thus, improved techniques for online collaboration are needed.